Happy Birthday, Mom...Miss You A Lot

My mother was a Christmas Eve baby, born on this day in 1924. It was the day that Albania became a republic, and just six days before astronomer Edwin Hubble announced that the Andromeda nebula was really a galaxy separate from our own Milky Way galaxy and that there are many such galaxies in the universe. She was born just one day before writer Rod Serling, who gave us, among other things, "The Twillight Zone", and she was just a month and two days older than actor Paul Newman, who was born on January 26, 1925.

So, today, I wanted to commemorate my mother's birth, 89 years ago today. She wasn't always an easy person. She came from a spectacularly dysfunctional extended family - this was the family that, when they had family reunions, every family group within the extended family sat together, apart from the rest, and some branches of the family barely talked to the other branches during the gathering. And, for years, we lived in the same mobile home park as one of her cousins, our houses a minute or two's walk apart, but we sometimes never saw that person for a year or year and a half at a time. The same with other members of her family that lived in the same town for those years. Often, we only saw them on Christmas Eve, and wouldn't have seen them then if we hadn't made a practice of delivering Christmas cookies and candy every Christmas Eve.

That was one of our Christmas Eve rituals - we played Fattening Fairies and spread calories all over town, and we always had fun doing it. That came after breakfast out for Mom's birthday. I'd always take her birthday present along and make her open it in the restaurant so that she'd get that as far away from her Christmas presents as possible. And then, on Christmas Eve evening, we'd do Christmas presents - that had become the family tradition around the time I was eleven or twelve, when it got to where I would wake up at 4 or 4:30 a.m. on Christmas morning and insist that it was time for presents. Mom and Daddy decided that since I had long since figured out that they were Santa Claus, we'd just do presents on Christmas Eve so that they could sleep in on Christmas morning.

Mom was an extremely shy person, and very quiet until she got to know you. After the got to know you, though, she was bright and articulate and very, very funny. She could also be snarky before snark was a thing. And she was the only sixty-something-year old mom I knew who would go to rock concerts. She always acted, beforehand, like she really didn't want to go, but then she'd get there and have a great time. It was interesting, watching her get older. Most people get more conservative as they get older. Not my mom. She got more open, more liberal, more accepting of people different from herself. That was quite an accomplishment, coming as she did from a family that was from the South (ish - she was born in Oklahoma and lived until she was about 9 years old in Arkansas) and had the usual prejudices so common in that part of the country at the time she was growing up.

I think she didn't really know sometimes how to take me, her Alien Child, who was the reader she wasn't, who loved science fiction and science and school and learning. We used to have these arguments when I was a child. I'd be in my room, or in the living room in front of the television, reading a book. She'd come in and tell me, "Go do something." I'd say, "But, Mom, I am doing something. I'm reading." Her reply was, "Go do something." And we'd go around and around about whether reading was "doing something." If it was nice weather, and it usually was since we lived in Southern California, I'd usually solve the problem by taking my book and going outside to read for a while.

But, she was also the only mom on the block who would come out and play with the neighbor kids, who all always seemed to be in our front yard - even when I would have rather been hiding somewhere reading a book. She'd play hopscotch with us, and jump rope, and badminton. Well, she'd play badminton with us until she killed the net one day with the lawn mower. She thought she could mow around the poles holding the net up. Except, not so much, and she knocked over one of the poles and the next thing she knew, the mower had eaten the entire net. After that, it was netless badminton for us, which wasn't nearly as much fun.

Mom and I actually didn't have all that much in common; I grew up much closer to my father than I was to her, but after Daddy died, it was just the two of us, and we had lots of good times together. Even after we left Southern California, we'd go to Disneyland at least once a year. It was her favorite place in the world. Even in the last stages of her dementia, when she didn't even know who I was half the time and when she was in no shape to go, she'd still ask on a regular basis when we could go to Disneyland again. We also went on epic trips to Las Vegas, where she would always win at the slots, and I got to where I wouldn't even play them because I'd always lose.

And, sometimes, we would take impromptu road trips just for the hell of it. The best one was the time I got up one morning, during a time when I wasn't going to school and happened not to have a job at the time, and I felt like doing something. So, I asked Mom if she felt like taking a little trip. She asked where to? I said, "I don't know. We could just see where we end up." This was about 10 a.m. The problem facing us was that we needed new brakes on the car. I called the mechanic we always went to and explained the situation, and he said he had time to do it if we could get the car to him right away. And so we did, and by around 2:30 that afternoon we had new brakes on the car, had packed, and were on the road. We spent that night in Sacramento, drove as far as Crescent City the next day, stayed the night there, and turned around and headed home the next day, spending a night somewhere north of San Francisco before making it back home. It was a great trip. Other times, we'd just head out to the coast for the day.

I miss Mom a lot, and even after her being gone for five years, will still catch myself seeing or hearing or reading something and thinking, "I can't wait to tell Mom about that." And I miss her most of all on her birthday, when it was always so much fun to make sure she got a birthday that was separate from all the Christmas stuff going on.

So, Happy Birthday, Mom. Love you. Miss you. I'm still your Alien Child, after all these years. You'd think I was nuts for dressing up in medieval garb and going camping and pretending like it's the Middle Ages, and for sitting and watching Doctor Who marathons. But I'll bet you'd have gotten into the spirit of both, just like how Daddy and I used to have to sneak off into my room to watch Star Trek when it was first on, but how, later on, when the movies started coming out, you were the one who always talked me into going to see them in the theater rather than waiting until they came out on video.

Happy Science Popularizer Day - and, yes, I just made that holiday up

Today, coincidentally, is the birthday of not one but two scientists who are notable for writing books about scientific subjects for the general public. The work of the popularizer is often a thankless job, but one that I think is important because I believe that the more one knows about the world, the better off one is, and the sad fact is that each person cannot be an expert in every field. Therefore, popular works that inform about fields that can be technical to the point of confusion for one who is not an expert can be quite valuable.

So, today is the birthday of Jared Diamond, who was born on this day in 1937. Diamond has written such books as The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005), and The World Until Yesterday (2012). His training was in physiology, and that is what he has taught at UCLA, in the medical school there. His writing, however, has seen him branch out into a number of fields, including anthropology, human evolution, and history.

Diamond has come into for his share of criticism for his work, including charges that he is too Eurocentric, that the arguments he makes in his books are weak, and that the large roles he assigns to geography and environment in the shaping of civilization are misplaced.

Like Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, who was born on this day in 1941, has been criticized for things he wrote and said in the course of his career as a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian, and prolific author of both specialist and popular books and articles. Among those criticisms were, like Diamond, that some of his explanations and arguments were weak. It is probably important to note that, especially in Gould's case, this criticism particularly has mostly come from those who disagree with his ideas and want to discount them.

It also probably has to be said that Gould did indeed take some stands that were controversial. He was co-developer, with Niles Eldredge, of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which claims that evolutionary change is not a slow, steady process, but occurs rapidly and in bursts, with long periods of stability in between. Gould was very vocal, as well, about his rejection of sociobiology, the idea that social behaviors are rooted in biology and evolution. Additionally, Gould did not approve of cladistics, a method of biological classification, which brought him a measure of criticism as the use of cladistics became more and more widespread.

Gould was also criticized for his politics, which some critics characterized as "Marxist," charging that he let his politics interfere with his scientific positions. This was probably exacerbated by Gould's willingness to discuss his father's Marxism and his statements that his own politics were probably to the left of center. But, he also claimed that his politics were different from those of his father. Still, today, there are those people who discount Gould's contributions by pulling out the "Marxist" label.

Gould did not hesitate to address the subject of religion, and claimed that science and religion are not, as some argue, in conflict. However, he also claimed that the two areas comprised "non-overlapping magisterial" that, while they do not conflict, also do not really have anything to say to or about each other. He spent some of his time writing about this idea in a book called Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999).

While Gould did not criticize religion as a category of knowledge as some scientists, notably Richard Dawkins, do, he also spent a significant amount of his time arguing against creationism and intelligent design and against their inclusion in public school science classrooms. Among his efforts on this topic, Gould testified against giving creationism equal time in the classroom in the landmark case McLean v. Arkansas in 1982. The case, which ruled that "creation science" is actually religion and not science and that its inclusion in public school science classrooms violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Unites States Constitution, has been influential in subsequent rulings relating to the teaching of creationism and intelligent design.

Gould was a prolific and eloquent writer. He wrote nearly 500 peer-reviewed papers during his career, around 100 book reviews, 22 books, and a long series of essays that included a series called "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine. He published several collections of these essays in book form. Gould was also a fixture in science documentaries on PBS and elsewhere.

Sadly, Gould died in 2002, at the age of 60, cutting short a remarkable career that, among many other accomplishments, saw him named a "Living Legend" by the US Library of Congress in April 2000.

In honor of the day, your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to go out and find some good popular science writing to read. I don't care what subject you choose, and it doesn't have to be something by either Gould or Diamond - although as a huge fan of Gould's writing, I would certainly not be sad if you chose to read some of his work, which can be challenging but is always rewarding.

Music Sunday: The "Born on the Same Day" Edition

Today's theme could very well be "odd coincidence".

First stop: a little bit of classical music from the violin of Itzhak Perlman, because he is very good and also because his birthday was yesterday. He was born August 31, 1945. Here he discusses a short, obscure piece of music before he plays it:



While I was looking around for something of Perlman's to share I found this, where he answers questions submitted over Internet. here, he talks about practicing, something I suspect he's done a lot of. I think what he has to say goes for practicing just about anything:



And now, some of the trivia. It turns out that Van Morrison's birthday was yesterday, as well. Further, it turns out that he was not only born in the same month and the same day as Itzhak Perlman, but that they were born in the same year, making them exactly the same age.

I'm not really a huge Van Morrison fan. On the other hand, I do like a lot of his music. One of his best-known songs is this one, "Wild Night":



My own favorite of Morrison's music is probably "Moondance", which is very jazzy:



Interesting, that two musicians who became so well known in very different spheres of music would have been born on the same day. But wait, as they say, there's more. Yesterday was also Bob Welch's birthday. Welch is no longer with us, and is not nearly as well known as Van Morrison or Itzhak Perlman, but he did have a huge hit with his 1977 album, "French Kiss". Arguably, the biggest hit from that album (there were three), was "Sentimental Lady". But, what is probably not widely known (or, at least, I didn't known it) is that the song was first recorded by Fleetwood Mac, on their album "Bare Trees" (1972) Welch was part of Fleetwood Mac from 1971 through 1974, and "Bare Trees" was the second album he recorded with them. I liked the solo version when it came out, but having now listened to the original version, I think I like it better:



One more thing: Not only was Bob Welch born on August 31, just like Morrison and Perlman, he was also born in 1945, making him also exactly the same age as them. Like I said, this week's theme is coincidence. More research could prove me wrong, but I can't think of too many cases of three people, born on the same day, finding any kind of public success in the same general arena.

Well, there were the Del Rubio triplets - Eadie, Elena, and Milly. They were actually triplets, all born on August 23, 1921, who were nightclub performers in the 1950s and then later did guest appearances on a number of television series and had a resurgence of popularity as a novelty act in the 1980s.

Here they are, guesting on Pee-Wee Herman's "Pee-Wee's Christmas Special":



But they are a special case. Perlman, Morrison, on the other hand, starting in very different places - Tel Aviv, Belfast, and Los Angeles - and with very different backgrounds, all managed to find some success in the same general field. The fact that all of them ended up being noted in the same field, albeit for very different kinds of music, fascinates me.

Music Sunday: The "Nearly-New-Year Birthdays" Edition

I'm still stuck in the middle of the doldrums of the final week of 2012 and trying to get rid of the last of this stupid cold. So, I fell back on my usual strategy when I'm not inspired and checked to see who in the music world has a birthday today. Some Sundays that doesn't work. This week, however, there happen to be several musical birthdays.

As it turns out, in fact, it is a double Monkees birthday today. I think I might have even known this fact, way back in the day, when I was a pre-teen and cared about such things as celebrity birthdays. Michael Nesmith turns 70 (if I've got my math right) and Davy Jones would have turned 67. So, I started looking for Monkees clips and found this instead: Nesmith in what was apparently his first television appearance as a singer, going by the name Michael Blessing, on the Lloyde Thaxton Show in 1965 and singing "Until It's Time For You to Go":



As an historical note, "The Lloyd Thaxton Show" began as a local music/dance show on KCOP, channel 13, in 1961 and then went into syndication nationally in late 1964. It was one of the shows I watched as a young music fan growing up.

That video led me to this clip of Davy Jones, auditioning for "The Monkees":



And also, to this clip from "The Ed Sullivan Show", with Jones playing the Artful Dodger in a scene from the Broadway musical "Oliver". As a historical note, this was the same episode of the Sullivan show, in February, 1964, that The Beatles made their debut:



Another Monkee, Micky Dolenz, is not having a birthday today, but I found this clip from "Circus Boy", a series he was on when he was very young. His stage name at the time was Mickey Braddock. "Circus Boy" aired from 1956 through 1958:



But I digress, since there are other birthdays today. Those include Patty Smith. I don't know that much about Smith's work, to be honest. However, I do know the song she wrote with Bruce Springsteen - "Because the Night" - and am of the opinion that her performance of the song is superior to his performance of it:



Also having a birthday today is Jeff Lynne of ELO. I found this live performance of the band's "Mr. Blue Sky":

The history geek has fun with dates...

Joe Biden, currently and just re-elected Vice-President of the United States and Norman Greenbaum, who was a one-hit-wonder with the song "Spirit in the Sky", were born on the same day, November 20, 1942.

This has nothing to do with anything.

Well, except that it has to do with the fact that I'm fascinated with dates and the things that happened on them. When I see a correlation like this, I feel compelled to mention it. I'm a little OCD that way sometimes.

I think I developed this fascination after I discovered one day that the first moon landing and Edward Kennedy's auto accident that led to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne happened on the same weekend, with the accident at Chappaquiddick occurring on July 18, 1969 while the first moon landing took place on July 20 of the same year.

Those two events have nothing to do with each other, of course, unless you take into consideration that it was Kennedy's brother, John F. Kennedy, who put the US on the course for the moon landing with his speech on May 25, 1961, in which he called for "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth" by the end of the 1960s. But with the way that the moon landing will reverberate throughout history, and the way that Edward Kennedy's misadventure reverberated through American politics and the rest of his life, it's just interesting to me that those two notable events occurred to close together.

Probably just the history geek in me.

I suppose there are some conspiracy theorists who could spin some sort of huge significance about Chappaquiddick and the Moon landing being on the same weekend. There are some, I suspect, who would even find something sinister about Biden and Greenbaum sharing the same birthdate.

For me, the fun of it is just in seeing the coincidences, pointing at them, and saying, "Hmmm. That's interesting."

Just proves that I'm easily amused.

And, for your amusement, and in case you aren't familiar with "Spirit in the Sky", here it is, in a promotional video apparently made at the time the song came out in 1969.

I Miss You, Daddy, Happy Birthday

It is September 17. Today would have been my father's 90th birthday.

Difficult as it is to believe, Daddy has been gone for thirty-five years. I still miss him. He was my fishing buddy, my movie buddy, my science fiction enabler. He was the one who taught me the love of books and that everything - and I mean everything - is interesting, one way or another.

He was also the most intelligent person I've ever known. He only had a high-school education, but that didn't stop him from reading everything. If there wasn't another book around, he'd go off and pick out a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and read that. He and my mom bought me that set of encyclopedias when I was in the eighth grade, from a vendor at the Ventura County Fair. But I suspect that I was only an excuse so that he could buy them for himself. The books, and the bookcase that came with them, lived in my room, but he helped himself to a volume on a regular basis. All that reading, in encyclopedias and elsewhere, must have paid off. I have witnessed him more than holding his own in conversations with people with vastly more formal education than he ever had the opportunity to get.

I think I've probably written here before about how Daddy was always arranging educational experiences for me. When I was five and we went to the drive-in one summer night, he arranged for me to get a tour of the projection room so that I could see exactly how the movies got onto the screen. We made regular trips to places like Griffith Park, to the observatory and planetarium, to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and to the county art museum. He gave me books to read.

Actually, before he gave me books to read, he gave me reading. You see, when I was very young, Daddy made sure he told me a bedtime story every night. Except, I kind of got stuck on one, and started insisting that he tell me the story of "Rumpelstiltskin" every single night. It didn't take that long for him to get bored, telling the same tale night after night after night. So, he started improvising. He'd change the story around and add bits, trying to make it more interesting for himself. Except that I knew how the story should go, and I'd insist that the tell it "the right way". Finally he got tired of that, and told me, one night, that if I ever wanted to hear that story again, I was going to have to learn to read it to myself. Which is how I ended up reading by the age of three.

By the time I was about seven or eight, he had started giving me science fiction novels to read. I had tested out as reading on an adult level when I was seven, at least partly thanks to the availability of a bookshelf full of Readers' Digest Condensed Books that my mother received, volume by volume, every three months but never really read. So, when he started handing me Bradbury and Clarke and Heinlein to read, I was ready. He'd already primed me by introducing me to science fiction films much earlier. But he also encouraged me to read other things, especially non-fiction.

He didn't just give me books to read and leave it at that. We discussed what I read. When I said I thought something was boring, he would tell me why it wasn't. His mission wasn't a complete success - there are still things that don't interest me that much - but he did succeed in instilling in me an appreciation for the whole world around me.

He also made sure I grew up knowing that all people are valuable. He had friends and acquaintances in many different ethnic groups, and he taught me that it is important to judge people by who they are, not what color their skin is or where their ancestors came from before Dr. King ever gave his speech to that effect. He had no tolerance for prejudice and made it clear that he expected me to follow his lead in that respect.

On the other hand, from the time I was able to do so, Daddy respected my right to disagree with him about things, including politics. I knew so many kids when I was growing up who were expected to parrot their parents' beliefs and who were punished when they did not. But Daddy always said that as long as I could defend my position on something intelligently, it was all right for me to hold that position. It's possible that this only worked because we agreed on most things. On the other hand, we argued about a few things on an ongoing basis. One of the things we argued most often about was the necessity for the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II - he believed it had been necessary and I do not - but even in those arguments, he didn't try to use his parental status to shut down my arguments, even though the subject was a lot more personal to him that it ever could possibly have been for me.

You see, Daddy spent two years as a prisoner of war in Europe during World War II. Or, as he sometimes called it, his time as "a guest of the Germans". He was a radio operator on a bomber operating out of North Africa and one day his plane was shot down over Italy. Parachutes being what they were then, he landed in a walnut tree (perhaps fitting, since that's what the family had on their land at home in California). He was taken prisoner and shipped off to Stalag 17 (yes, the one the movie was about), in Austria. He never talked about the bad stuff, only the things he found amusing. Things like the time he was shot in the leg by a guard during a baseball game. Forgetting momentarily where he was, he started over the fence to retrieve a ball that had been hit too hard. I suppose it was understandable why the guard shot first and asked questions later, since people were always trying to escape. I'm not completely sure why Daddy thought that getting shot was funny, but he laughed every time he told that story. I don't know if that was the wound that earned him his Purple Heart, but I kind of hope it was.

I suspect that his time as a prisoner of war is what made Daddy as laid back about most things as he was. Oh, things would get to him and he'd get angry once in awhile, but mostly he just sort of went with the flow. One of the things he didn't talk much about was the end of the war, when the Germans marched most of the thousands of POWs in the camp clear across Austria, trying to get away from the Russians, who were on their way. He mentioned that it had happened, but it wasn't until I did some research a few years ago that I discovered that the march was clear across the country and that when prisoners couldn't keep up, the guards just shot them and left them to die. It seems to me that an experience like that, once survived, could tend to lead to the feeling that most of the frustrations of everyday life weren't really much to worry about in comparison to that life-or-death situation. I suspect, also, that the experience had a lot to do with Daddy's unwillingness to have firearms around. He'd probably had more than enough of guns by the time his POW experience was over.

Even without the guns, being in a German POW camp had to have been an iffy situation for Daddy. After all, he had been born in Germany. Although his family came to California when he was just two and a half years old and he didn't speak German, he understood it quite well. He always talked about how it had been very, very important that the guards and other camp officials not discover that he could understand what they were saying when the spoke German. It could have, he said, been very, very bad for him if they had known.

That experience probably led to another of the important things that Daddy shared with me, although he also got a healthy dose of it from his father. Daddy always instilled in me the belief that it is important to always question authority. He made sure that I knew the difference between questioning authority and flouting it, explaining that challenging authority was not about just ignoring it for the hell of it and doing what you wanted to do instead. But his belief that it is not healthy to just do what you are told because someone in authority told you to do it probably also came, at least to some extent, from having lived under the authoritarian Nazis during his time as a POW. He taught me that it is always important to find out why someone in authority wants you to do something, and then evaluate whether that thing is in your best interests, or simply in the best interests of the authority who wants you to do that thing. This went double, he always said, if the person is a politician. He didn't like politicians much.

So, yes. It's been thirty-five years, and I still miss my father. I am the person I am because of him, because of the time he took to teach me thing things he did...that everything is interesting. That you have to be able to support your opinions logically. That other people don't always have your best interests in mind. Also, that fishing is fun even if you don't catch any fish. That everyone matters, not just the rich or the famous or the powerful. That it's easier to be kind than to be rude. That history matters. That science is a good thing. And, oh, so much more.